Digital images, from digital cameras or scanned photographic film, can be viewed, stored, retrieved, and printed using a home computer, or can be uploaded to a web site for viewing, as described in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,215 to Fredlund et al., the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. Using a web browser, a group of these digital images can be viewed and selected for printing, for example using the Kodak Photonet Service. The user can select the size of each print to be produced, and the quantity of prints to be made from each image.
Images can be organized into categories according to the people, places, subjects or events depicted, as described in a paper entitled “FotoFile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System” by Kuchinsky et al. This paper describes metadata attributes that are used to describe certain images, including a “favorite” attribute that is used to indicate the “best” images in a user's collection. However, in this paper, the “favorite” attribute can only be used to help retrieve one user's images on their own PC, since there is nothing in the “favorite” attribute to designate which user has indicated that this is a “favorite” image. If the PC is used by more that one user, the FotoFile system is unable to distinguish which user labeled the image as a “favorite”. Furthermore, the favorite attribute is stored in a database separate from the digital image files. Therefore, when the digital image files are used on a different system, for example when the images are transferred via a CD-R or other media, or are uploaded to an on-line photo service provider, the favorite attribute information is no longer available.
Various types of metadata related to images have been standardized. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) group ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, “Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio”, has developed an “MPEG-7 Requirements Document” V.8, No. N2727, March 1999, which defines various types of metadata that can be stored with moving images. Also, the Digital Imaging Group (DIG) has developed the DIG35 metadata standard. However, neither of these specifications defines metadata, which indicates that an image is a favorite image for a particular user.
Album pages can be produced from digital images by arranging numerous images on the same page, as described in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,004,061 to Manico et al., the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. These album pages can be customized in terms of the size and arrangement of images on the page, the size and finish of the album pages, and the background color or patterns used. The method of organizing digital images on an album page is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/559,478, filed Apr. 27, 2000 by Simon, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. However, this method does not enable a user's favorite images to be automatically featured, for example by making them larger or more prominent, unless the user manually intervenes and manually adjusts their images.